THE WARHOL FILES: ANDY WARHOL’S LONG-LOST COMPUTER GRAPHICS

by jonippolito (07.28.14 11:06 am)

Cory Arcangel is perhaps the only person in the world equally qualified to assess the significance of these works for both art history and computer history. His insights into the performative nature of digital media should be lessons for any student of computational culture.

As for the graffiti reference, I know several artists who made the jump from spraycan to pixels in the 1990s. Until now, I've usually considered the analogy to work best for Internet art, in which graffiti artists piggybacked on a new, more virtual public system of conveyance. (TCP is after all a “transport” protocol.)

However, Arcangel's insights into the material form of Warhol's digital experiments show I was off by a decade. The fact that he wrote his files directly on the GraphiCraft application disksout of expediency, it turns outsuggests that this assisted readymade might be considered another form of digital graffiti.